Microsoft-owned Github fires entire Indian engineering team

Github, a Microsoft-owned software code hosting platform, has fired its entire Indian engineering team of over 140 developers in order to "streamline" the company's operations.

"What I am hearing: GitHub's India engineering team is no more. Yesterday, the complete dev team was let go at once. We're talking of ~100 engineers," Gergely Orosz, who runs the newsletter Pragmatic Engineer, reported the layoffs.

The layoffs on the Indian team are surprising given that the country is one of the world's largest developer markets and an important technical hub for many major businesses. Orosz added that the cost of labour in India is substantially lower than in the United States and European Union.

The explanation for this could be that the team was smaller than in other places, with fewer and lower priority tasks.

"As part of the reorganisation plan shared in February, workforce reductions were made today as part of difficult but necessary decisions and realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward," GitHub spokesperson told the news website, Tech Crunch.

This layoff is a part of the 10% staff reduction that the firm announced in February.

"Although our entire leadership team has carefully deliberated this step and come to an agreement, ultimately, as CEO the decision is mine. I recognise this will be difficult on you all, and we will approach this period with the utmost respect for every Hubber," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said in an email to staff members.